Hey buddyjude, welcome to our Blogging Community!

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Quickposts vs. Community Blogs

The Basics: A quickpost is a sort of super comment, a short idea about anything. Most people are kind of using it

kind of like Twitter, while others use it to notify their followers about cool things they found online. Quickposts are fast and fun - give it a shot by posting on the top right corner.

When you're ready to post something longer, like a paragraph or two, try our community blogs.

Why our Community Blogs rock

The most obvious reason is that we inexplicably naturally attract cool people. We don't question this fact, it's just the way it is :) But more importantly our software puts you front and center: Unlike a regular blog, where you're out alone in the web wilderness, tomopop will publish your story instantly to a directory shared by our readers. Some of our readers use the "Lovefest" mode to view a mix of community and editor posts on the front page, which gives you another opportunity to be discovered.
Great blogs are voted up, and you'll soon earn followers. "Failblogs", the opposite of awesomeness, we can do without. As such, we want to help you make the best first impression:

How to make a good first impression:

Generally speaking, you want to put some work into your profile to stand out. If you post a blog a guest your blank icon it already says "this person didn't even try". We suggest:

1) You should upload an avatar CHECK!

2) You should write a brief bio

Give your readers little bit about the author - just enough to they understand who the writer is, it doesn't have to be an autobiography or anything super personal. Maybe list some your favorite stuff, for starters.

Complete your About You page. You can also edit this anytime by clicking any of the edit links alongside the right column of your blog.

3) Knowing when to Quickblog vs. Long blog:

It's not so scary. However, be mindful of a few things. A good community blog is intended to be a complete article, have entertainment value of some kind, and formatted nicely. If you toss a blog up that looks like a quickly thrown-together email with no photos or care you'll never earn readers, and unlikely ever get your blog promoted to our home page.

Here's an example of something that should instead be a Quickpost, not a blog:

Oh hey I'm new here wuz up I've been reading the site for 99 years and this is my first blog! I like tacos! Nice to meet everyone!!! -Niero

If you post that as a community blogs instead of a quickpost you're misusing the tools. Putting a quickpost into a community blog is what we call a "fail blog". Don't be that guy.

Blogs are complete thoughts. They should be able to stand alone. When you're ready to talk about an interesting topic, in 1-2 paragraphs and ask readers to respond to your thoughts then you're ready to blog. Got it?

One last thing -- be mindful that this is a 'shared' space, so don't push a bunch of blogs together one after the other. After you publish, try commenting and following other bloggers before you blog again to allow people to check your story out, and post new stories as well.

If you are copying and pasting from another blog, please take some time to personalize it for this community. Nobody likes copy-pasta, it's spammy.

There are more blogging tips at the bottom of the editing screen, like how to format BBcode and resizing your photos.

In Summary:

1) Completely fill out your profile
2) Know the difference between QuickPosts and Community blogs
3) It's ok to Quickpost all day
4) Don't spam the Community blogs

This message will disappear when your profile is 100% complete. Happy blogging! If you have any questions, reach us anytime at support@tomopop.com